Why I’ve been looking at functional languages (redux)

October 1, 2009

There are a diminishing number of people in the world I haven’t cornered and harangued with this argument, which is that the dominant languages of the future will prevent the worst 95% of programmers hanging themselves when writing concurrent programs, rather than the one that is efficient in the hands of the other 5%. This is why I’m convinced functional languages will happen this time around. It seems Tim Bray agrees, at least in principle:

… Once you get past Doug Lea, Brian Goetz, and a few people who write operating systems and database kernels for a living, it gets very hard to find humans who can actually reason about threads well enough to be usefully productive.